The Weight of Silence
The rain had stopped sometime before dawn, leaving the streets of Jongno slicked with a silver sheen that caught the first light in fractured pieces. Serina walked the same route she always walked, past the rice cake vendor who had not yet raised his shutters, past the old woman who swept her doorstep with a broom made of twigs, past the alley where a stray cat watched her with eyes like amber buttons. She counted seventeen steps from the corner to the studio door, as she had counted them every morning for three years, and on the seventeenth step she finally let herself breathe.
Jin & Cho Textile Studio occupied the ground floor of a narrow brick building that had once been a printing house. The sign above the door was modest, hand-painted, the gold lettering chipped at the corners from years of wind and weather. Serina loved it precisely for its smallness. There was nothing here that demanded anything of her beyond her hands and her attention, and that was enough. That was, in fact, everything.
She unlocked the door before any of the others arrived, as she always did, and stepped into the familiar dimness. The smell greeted her first — raw silk, faintly sweet and mineral, mixed…
